1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to network systems and in particular to network portal systems
2. Description of Related Art
Laptop and notebook computers abound, virtually every enterprise in every business sector uses e-mail for internal and external communications, mobile phones are commonplace, and many people carry personal digital assistants (PDAs) with wireless communication capability. Internet cafes can be found in almost every city, airports routinely have Internet kiosks, and most hotel rooms come equipped with data communication facilities.
With these developments come limitations and frustrations. Laptops and notebooks frequently require that special applications be installed. If work needs to be done when that particular machine is not available, the work must be postponed. In addition, there are employees without laptops who nonetheless need to access information and applications when they are away from the office.
Data on laptops must be synchronized with data on the enterprise's central computers. Before employees can work on their laptops, they must be certain that they have the latest information, and that after they have finished, the centrally housed information must be updated.
Functionality available from mobile phones and PDAs is typically limited to general information services, such as stock quotes and airline schedules.
Many enterprises have realized significant benefits from client/server technology, but this typically entails the installation of specialized software on the client systems, thereby limiting access to only those devices with the specialized software as well as placing a maintenance burden on the organization, which must propagate changes and updates to all individual workstations, laptop computers, etc.
As organizations implemented individual applications, frequently in different languages, functionality and data often became fragmented. A growing amount of valuable information is available from web-based service providers. However, locating the information can be time-consuming, and the information comes in as isolated pieces of data.
As a result, people are frequently not able to do the work they need to do when they want to do it. The information would be more valuable if the information were made available to corporate applications and merged with enterprise data.
Competitive business pressures make this issue even more urgent. Not long ago, it was perfectly acceptable, for example, for a salesperson to return to a customer's office the following day with requested information. Today, however, immediacy and convenience are the keywords; with the Internet, people have become accustomed to accessing data on demand and to taking action whenever they wish. Any work that has to be postponed because the salesperson could not access applications or data can mean lost opportunity.
Enterprise portals are being developed to close the gap between what users would like to do and what technological constraints permit them to do. While the rapid rate of recent technological innovation has been exciting, there are many attendant restrictions.
Enterprise portals allow users to access a wide variety of applications, services, and data through a single entry point (the portal). Portal computing is a network solution that aims to make recent technological advances serve the way people actually work-r would like to work. Recognizing the advantages of portal computing, several service providers have already embraced the concept, albeit in a limited sense, offering their customers a growing number of application services. Notable examples include Yahoo!, Excite, and Lycos. Although these all started as search engines, they now offer such capabilities as e-mail, stock quotes, calendar facilities, etc.
Quick to join the bandwagon, many suppliers have announced portal products. Some are not solutions, but rather tools that would allow companies to develop their own, severely limited portals. Some products provide the ability to access and consolidate different types of data from various sources for reporting purposes, but do nothing to support the inclusion of existing applications. Others may support a diversity of data as well as the ability to interface with existing applications (to varying degrees), but they place restrictions on the types of devices people can use to access the system.
A further limitation of these portal products is the great number of different content and services available over a network like the Internet which in turn, has lead to an enormous variety of different communication standards, data formats and file formats, which are sometimes proprietary for the particular content and services.
As a consequence, services or content provided by some provider systems may be incompatible with services or content provided by other provider systems and thus have a “stove-pipe” nature as to their presence and operation on networks. In addition, there exist many different communication schemes for content or service, which communication schemes again may be incompatible and not universally accessible or supported by all client systems. Accordingly, the existing portal products are limited to a subset of client systems and permit this subset of client systems to access at most a limited amount of content that is available.